Rep. Hensarling Piles On The GOP's Bogus 'Obama-Made-It-Worse' Claim

June 17, 2011 2:24 pm ET —
Kate Conway

Having
been confronted over and over by the reality that the current recession — the worst since the Great Depression — had
its roots in the policies of the George W.
Bush administration, congressional Republicans have been more or less forced to
acknowledge that President Obama came into office with the country already facing
a dire economic situation. That hasn't stopped them from leveling other
insincere attacks on the president's economic policies, however. Lately,
they've settled on the phrase that Obama "made it worse."

Last summer, Democrats
told America that our economy was recovering because of their massively
expensive and unpopular agenda. This
summer, we can look back at more than two years of this administration's
job-destroying policies and see that President Obama did not reverse our
economic crisis-he made it worse. [...]

As long as 'progress'
and 'results' are code words for 'historic unemployment' and 'economic
disaster,' then the Democrats are right. The economy did indeed take a
turn-from bad to worse.

President Obama might
not have started this mess, but his administration's outrageous spending
policies made it much worse. With unemployment at its highest sustained level
since the Great Depression, new business creation at a 17-year low, and one in
seven Americans on food stamps, it's no surprise that the vast majority of the
nation believes we're on the wrong track - we are.

House
Republicans, who have now been in the majority for nearly six months, have failed
to even consider a single jobs bill, so it's
remarkable in and of itself that they have the gall to go after anyone's
shortcomings on addressing "historic unemployment." But even more egregiously,
asserting that policies like the Recovery Act have worsened the economic crisis is baloney.

Before
Obama took office, the private sector was shedding hundreds of thousands of
jobs a month. The Recovery Act helped turn that trend around and has resulted
in 15 consecutive months of private-sector job growth. Indeed,
since Hensarling's chosen starting point of last June, the economy has gained over 1.6 million net jobs.

The
economy is making demonstrable progress — and no one claimed it would have recovered
completely by this time. Yet Republicans are reacting to the millions of people
still out of work by wasting time attacking the president and opposing any
pro-growth policies the administration tries to enact.